Category Archives: KPCB

Every year, I look forward to two reports: The Deloitte Human Capital Trends report and the Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends report. I’ve written about the Deloitte report here and here; and the Internet Trends report here and here. The 2017 Internet Trends report was published last week and it’s a doozy!

Ever year Mary Meeker, from Kleiner Perkins, takes a vast look at what the Internet is doing to the world. How it is changing everything. While it’s never about HR, per se, HR is in most nooks and crannies of the data that are shared. And it really should be required reading for all business leaders. Including HR. This year, at 355 pages, the report is a blockbuster. And worthy of more than one Data Point Tuesday post.

This year’s report looks at these areas:

Global internet trends

Online advertising (and commerce)

Interactive games

Media

The cloud

China Internet

India Internet

Healthcare

Global public/private Internet companies

Some macro thoughts

Closing thoughts

To be honest, I always start with the macro thoughts section. This is where she drops the aha! moments. Well, at least for me. And this year was no different. Part of the macro thoughts are about USA, Inc. and she leads off with the USA’s income statement comparing F1986 through F2016. If you think of the USA as a business, this is eye popping.

What does this have to do with HR? Well, nothing and everything. Understanding income statements is a requirement for any business leader today. Including those in HR. Understanding how our businesses spend and make money is key to being able to successfully lead and invest in people.

Understanding our nation’s income statement should be a requirement for every citizen. Knowing how the taxes we pay are used, where our money is being invested, and the state of our debt are all important things for us to know. Be honest: have you ever really thought about our nation’s finances from an income statement perspective? Even if you have, this ought to be under a magnet on your refrigerator door!

Knowing the state of our nation’s finances will put into perspective the state of your employer’s finances – and the choices that are being made nationally as well as at work. This is called perspective and it’s a valuable thing to have.

Next week, we’ll take a look at another aspect of the Internet Trends Report for 2017 that may have a more direct connection to the world of HR. In the meantime, you might take a look at it here. (And the 355 pages are PowerPoint pages, so they’re pretty easy to move through.)

Data Point Tuesday’s mission is to find reports and impactful data sources that most HR professionals would never find and serve up some of their more interesting data points for consideration. Usually the reports come out of the Human Capital Management arena: academic papers, vendor survey analyses, white papers, etc. There’s a ton of data flowing in our space that the average HR person would never have the time to find. It’s what I do here. But sometimes the best data and analytics sources don’t come out of the HCM arena. And the annual Internet Trends reports is one of those sources.

I have been waiting with bated breath for Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2016 report – and it’s here! Last year, I suggested that the report really should have been titled The Internet in 2015 Is All About HR. I wrote about it here. This year, I think the report should be titled How the Internet is Just Beginning to Change Everything at Work. Again, it should be required reading for HR professionals everywhere.

The annual Internet Trends report that Meeker publishes is certainly not an HR report. But it contains critical information and data that HR people need to know. It’s all big picture stuff that relates to the Internet, but it also all has impact on people – and most of it has impact on people at work. In the U.S., in Asia, in Europe – all over the world. I encourage you to flip through the report – it’s in PowerPoint – even though it’s really long. This is the outline – and I defy you to not find the majority of it interesting and relevant to your HR work, your workforce planning and your role in setting business strategy.

Here are the topics covered in this year’s report:

Global Internet Trends

Global Macro Trends

Advertising/Commerce + Brand Trends

Re-Imagining Communication – Video/Image/Messaging

Re-Imagining Human-Computer Interfaces – Voice/Transportation

China = Internet Leader on Many Metrics

Public/Private Company Data

Data as a Platform/Data Privacy

Every single one of these topics has an impact on how you interact with your people, your people strategy or your people policies. Seriously.

For example, as you think through your internal communication strategy, this graph might be helpful:

Think it’s useful to know that 64% of Baby Boomers cite the telephone as their most preferred contact channel vs. 12% of Millennials? (It won’t be shocking, I hope, to note that Millennials prefer – by 48% — social media and internet/web chat channels.) While you might instinctively know this, seeing the hard data puts the need to rethink employee communication into a different perspective, doesn’t it.?

The advent of using microphones instead of keyboards to interface with computing is in very early days, according to Meeker. However, in 2013 35% of smartphone owners used voice assistants (think Siri) and 65% used the voice interface in 2015. Adoption is rising fast among smartphone owners of all ages. Even if the majority of voice commands are about calling and navigating home, the use is skyrocketing. And as the Boomers age, think of the impact – at home and at work – of not needing to use a keyboard to utilize technology. Is your organization prepared for this radical shift?

In the US, the reasons for using voice interface and the locations we are using it are not so focused on the job. But the trends are pretty clear. What can you do to anticipate and leverage this and enhance productivity, knowledge transfer and the employee experience?

So if calling mom and dad, and navigating (literally) home are the current most often uses of using voice for computer activation, then the charts above make an inordinate amount of sense. But if you keep the oldest demographic of the workforce in mind when reading these charts, you can see that a sea change could be on the very near horizon. What if the oldest demographic of the workforce isn’t going away in the next 10 years? Even more, what if enabling/convincing the oldest demographic of the workforce to stay in the workforce was the key to your workforce plans over the next 10 years? And what if the newest/youngest demographic of the workforce was already using voice for computer interaction nearly 100% of the time as they enter the economy?

Interesting data. Interesting questions. See what I mean about non-HR sources of data?

And just to leave you wishing for the good old days, there’s this graph comparing the attributes of technology use among the emerging Gen Z cohort to the Millennials:

As my dad used to say, “If that doesn’t make your hair curl, I don’t know what will!”

The workplace and workforce planning implications of this report put the future in new light. A good light, I think. A challenging, but good light. And a light you need to focus. What do you think?

Really. I’m not kidding. You may think from the title that Internet Trends 2015 is a report that has nothing to do with Human Resources. You couldn’t be more wrong. It’s ALL about HR. And how nearly everything about business, work and the employer/employee relationship is changing because of what the internet enables.

The report, prepared by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’Mary Meeker for this year’s Code Conference, presents the 2015 Internet Trends report, 20 years after the first The Internet Report was published in 1995. You’ve probably heard about this year’s report because every journalist in the world was agog at one piece of data: how Millennials relate to their smartphones. Everyone now knows that 87% of Millennials in the U.S. report that “my smartphone never leaves my side, night or day.” That’s one of several data points on one page of a 196 page report. And while interesting, it is among the least interesting data points in the report. I promise.

But first. You need to know some definitions to get the full value of the report. Here are a few terms and acronyms you should – and probably already – know:

MAU = Monthly Active Users (how many users are on an application at least once a month)

DAU = Daily Active Users (how many users are on an application at least once a day)

This report hits on all of HR’s buttons with high impact data: the nature of work, the job market, benefits, age demographics in the workplace, freelancers, government benefits, union participation, employer retirement plans, healthcare, the impact of drones on work, what’s happening in China and India and more. All in a report about internet trends. And almost every page is a data-rich picture of how things are changing. This might be my favorite page because it is the continuous thread of everything else discussed in the report:

And this might be my favorite chart because the impact of the data here fuels most everything else mentioned in the report. The connections between economic growth/decline, demographic changes, the internet and business impact every HR person everywhere, every day. Everywhere. Every day. This report shows these connections clearly.

I’d like to make this report mandatory reading for all HR professionals. If you’re having a hard time grasping what the opportunity really is for HR to keep ahead of the profound changes happening all around us, this report will help you understand. Read it. Discuss some of the findings (pay particular attention to the section at the end, Ran Outta Time Thoughts) in staff meetings and with other leaders in your organization. Develop a point of view about how internet trends are impacting your organization and your people, and begin to strategize responses that will work for your business and your people. You must.